Bro Digest, Vol 121, Issue 10

Hi Li,

I don’t know how much relevant this solution is to the case presented, but might worth a try.We run a bro cluster of 4 worker nodes and a manager. We recently started seeing a lot of capture loss (>60%)
and tried doing some tuning of the interfaces:
Turned off Tx and Rx check-summing on the NIC, hence reduced the lag between packets captured by interface and packets processed by BRO.
Also, check-sum calculation is default in BRO, hence turning it off on interface won’t create any security issues.

$ sudo ethtool -K em1 rx off
Actual changes:
rx-checksumming: off
large-receive-offload: off [requested on]
$ sudo ethtool -K em1 tx off
Actual changes:
tx-checksumming: off
tx-checksum-ipv4: off
tx-checksum-ipv6: off
tx-checksum-sctp: off
tcp-segmentation-offload: off
tx-tcp-segmentation: off [requested on]
tx-tcp6-segmentation: off [requested on]
$ sudo ethtool -K em1 sg off
Actual changes:
scatter-gather: off
tx-scatter-gather: off
generic-segmentation-offload: off [requested on]
$ sudo ethtool -K em1 tso off
$ sudo ethtool -K em1 gso off
$ sudo ethtool -K em1 gro off

This reduced the capture loss % to below 1%, and the cluster is not seeing any capture loss till date.

Thanks,
Fatema.